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Monday, November 24, 2014

Daydreams About Ice Things

Yeah. I'm bitten. And if your follow this blog at all, you probably know it. The fact is that I like ice fishing WAY too much for someone who lives in Georgia. I watch reports from northern friends with undeniable envy and do a lot of dreaming and scheming of ice travels. Fortunately, I sell a lot of ice stories and photos to various magazines and websites, so traveling well to the north two or three times every winter makes good business sense to me, along with being big fun.

If you have facebook friends who live in the ice belt, you likely know it. If you live there you know it all too well. Winter is coming on quickly this year, and with Thanksgiving not even yet passed, quite a few fishermen have already been out on the ice. And I'm not even talking about eager beavers who tiptoe where they probably ought not tread. Quite a few places now have several inches of really good ice, and conditions are getting better every day.

My first ice trip of this winter remains a few weeks away, but it's solidly planned, so I have something to count down toward. I have a little extra anticipation about this one because we'll be spending a couple of nights in a sleeper house, out on the lake, which is something I haven't done before. Why I'm excited about sleeping in a hut on the ice, I can't tell you exactly. But I am.

Because it's always most practical for me to fly to ice trips and because it only makes sense to go a few times each winter, I've not begun gathering any of the bigger equipment I'd likely have if I lived in the North. I have ice rods, good clothes for most conditions and plenty of ice lures. I don't have my own hut, auger or ice electronics. I sometimes think about an ice tour road trip, which would involve gathering that stuff for myself, but so far, I've not done more than thinking about such a plan, and a this point, the time, gas, miles between me and most ice fishing destinations, and a lack of knowledge are bigger prohibitives than the equipment.

For now, I'll have to stick with vicarious ice fishing through friends on facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Soon I'll be back out there, though! Very soon.